Is a bullish percent indicator the percentage of stocks rising today?

BPI counts active P&F buy signals. A stock can fall today while retaining its buy signal, or rise today while retaining its sell signal. Daily advancing-stock percentages and moving-average breadth use different rules.

What does a BPI of 60 mean?

It means 60% of the defined universe has an active P&F buy signal, assuming complete coverage. In the hypothetical example, that is 12 of 20 stocks. It is not a probability of a market rise or an expected return.

Why do two BPI providers show different values?

Compare constituent lists, share-class treatment, P&F settings, adjusted prices, missing-data policies and timestamps. Differences in those inputs can change the count even when both providers use the same percentage formula.

Can I use BPSPX or BPNDX on TradingView?

Verify availability and the exact provider symbol in your account first. $BPSPX and $BPNDX are StockCharts identifiers for S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 BPI. This page does not verify a matching TradingView feed or promise that a subscription provides it.

Can Pineify calculate the whole market BPI from my stock chart?

A single stock chart lacks the full constituent histories and signal states. Pineify can help draft Pine Script around data you can access, but code generation does not provide missing feeds, remove TradingView request limits or establish historical membership.

TradingView market breadth guide

Bullish Percent Index: count Point-and-Figure buy signals

The Bullish Percent Index (BPI) is the percentage of stocks in a defined universe with an active Point-and-Figure (P&F) buy signal: 100 × buy-signal count / constituent count. A reading of 60 means 60% meet that rule, not that 60% rose today. This page explains the calculation and data checks; it does not display a live BPI feed.

See the decision guide

A buy signal is a persistent state, not a daily price change

StockCharts defines a P&F buy signal as an X column breaking above the preceding X column. It remains active until an O column breaks below the preceding O column, producing a sell signal. Changing from an X column to an O column alone does not necessarily cancel the buy signal.

Counting stocks above a moving average measures a different form of breadth. Label that output by its actual rule rather than calling it BPI.
Bull/Bear Power measures price relative to an EMA for a chart symbol. It does not supply the constituent signal states required here.

Hypothetical stock	Observation	BPI treatment
Stock A	Price closes higher today but has not broken the prior X-column high; its last signal was sell.	Still excluded from the buy-signal count.
Stock B	Price closes lower today, but its active buy signal has not been replaced by a sell signal.	Still included in the buy-signal count.
Stock C	An X column exceeds the previous X-column high and replaces a sell signal.	Adds one to the count, regardless of market capitalization.

Calculate BPI for a 20-stock universe

Assume 20 eligible stocks with complete P&F histories at the same observation time. Twelve have active buy signals and eight have sell signals. BPI = 100 × 12 / 20 = 60%. The following hypothetical observations are sequential; they are an arithmetic example, not historical market data.

With membership fixed at 20, one net state change moves BPI by 5 percentage points. With 500 eligible stocks, it moves BPI by 0.2 percentage points.
The replacement row shows why a falling BPI need not mean an existing stock generated a new sell signal. Membership can change the result.
For a separate incomplete snapshot with 12 buys, six sells and two unknown states, 12 / 18 = 66.67% describes the observed subset. The full 20-stock value is unknown, bounded by 60% and 70%; do not silently publish 66.67% as full-universe BPI.

Observation	Buy count / total	BPI	Reason
Initial snapshot	12 / 20	60%	Twelve active buy signals.
Next completed observation	13 / 20	65%	Two stocks switch to buy and one switches to sell: 12 + 2 − 1 = 13.
Constituent replacement	12 / 20	60%	One buy-state stock leaves and one sell-state stock enters. The other stocks do not change state.

Separate stock P&F settings from the BPI chart settings

StockCharts describes its underlying BPI calculation using traditional box sizing and three-box reversal P&F charts. Traditional scaling uses a price-range table. Replacing it with ATR or percentage boxes can change which stocks have buy signals, so a custom calculation must identify that choice.

For a BPI column ending at 64 on that two-point grid, a fall to 58 is a three-box reversal. This is a six-percentage-point fall, not a 6% relative decline.
Changing the display of an already published BPI does not recalculate its constituent signals. A line chart can move while the P&F display remains in the same column.

Layer	What its settings control	Check
Each constituent stock	The price moves needed to form columns and change the active signal.	Box method and size, reversal count, high/low versus close inputs, adjustments and sufficient prior history.
The aggregated BPI series	The display of the resulting percentage as a line or P&F chart.	StockCharts illustrates BPI with two-percentage-point boxes and a three-box reversal: six percentage points.

Audit the universe, denominator and publication time

StockCharts publishes BPI from maintained component lists and adjusted stock prices, with end-of-day updates. Its documentation warns that other providers can differ because of constituent and price-data choices. Record the provider alongside the value instead of treating every similarly named series as interchangeable.

StockCharts uses $BPSPX for S&P 500 breadth and $BPNDX for Nasdaq 100 breadth. These are provider identifiers, not a guarantee of identical symbols or access on TradingView.
Under a strict complete-coverage policy, mark BPI unavailable if any required constituent state is unknown or the denominator is zero. If publishing partial coverage, label both the subset result and coverage count.

Data requirement	What to record	Failure condition
Point-in-time membership	Eligible securities and effective addition/removal dates for every historical observation.	Applying today's members to old dates changes the historical population and can introduce survivorship bias.
Denominator	Actual eligible count, security/share-class policy and unknown-state count.	An index name is not proof that the denominator is always exactly 500 or 100.
Price history	Corporate-action adjustments, source fields, P&F initialization and coverage.	Insufficient history or a missing quote must not silently become a sell signal.
Availability time	Observation date, publication timestamp, time zone and revision policy.	Using an end-of-day value before it was published gives a historical strategy information too early.

Interpret levels without assuming a reversal

The conventional 30 and 70 levels mark low and high breadth zones. Above 50, a majority of included stocks have buy signals. These descriptions do not establish an entry price, reversal date or profitable trade. A high reading can persist, and a low reading can accompany further weakness.

Separate level from direction: 65% rising from 60% and 65% falling from 70% have the same current proportion but different recent changes.
A rising index price with falling BPI is a participation divergence only after matching the universe and observation dates. It is not proof that the index must fall next.
If using BPI as a strategy filter, define confirmation time, entry, exit, position size and costs separately. Test the rule using values that were available at each decision time.

Use a verified BPI series for TradingView alerts

First confirm that the intended series is accessible in your TradingView account. Inspect the provider, definition, update schedule and history. A community indicator named Bullish Percent may use a custom basket or moving-average rule; read its calculation before comparing it with a published P&F index.

Compare several completed observations with the provider. Check the 0-to-100 scale and timestamps before selecting alert thresholds.
Specify whether an alert fires on crossing a level or while remaining above it. For a daily feed, an intraday chart-bar close does not by itself establish that the daily observation is final.
TradingView documents 40 unique request.*() calls per script, or 64 on Ultimate. Requesting hundreds of constituents individually exceeds those limits; loops do not remove the limit.
TradingView P&F data is constructed from lower-timeframe prices and approximates tick-based calculations. Requesting a P&F series for one symbol does not produce a market-wide BPI.
Give Pineify the verified symbol or accessible series, observation frequency, threshold, confirmation policy and missing-data behavior. Ask the AI Coding Agent to draft a state alert, then review its source and compare its outputs in TradingView.

Where Pineify fits

Pine Script AI Coding Agent

Draft and review state-alert logic for a BPI series you can access. The coding workflow does not supply missing breadth data or automatically reconstruct a historical index universe.

Specify a BPI state alert

Related resources

TradingView indicator guides McClellan Oscillator: breadth momentum Arms Index: issue counts and volume Alert confirmation at bar close

Frequently asked questions

Educational information, not investment advice. Numerical examples are hypothetical. BPI does not guarantee price direction or returns; constituent coverage, data timing and calculation settings affect the result.

Sources and verification

Last verified: 2026-10-17